Look Who’s Talking

One yoga student walks into the studio one day, bringing along a yoga mat (although we provide them free for you at Sunrise Yoga!) and two little voices her head. One voice belongs to Ego, who can get very loud and almost impossible to drown out. The other belongs to Humility, a soft-spoken fellow who is easy to push around.

After stepping into the studio and unrolling her yoga mat, the student follows along with the instructor’s lesson for the day and at first everything is going fine. After a few preparatory poses, the instructor then says, “your next pose is downward facing dog”, which she demonstrates before carefully leading her students into the pose. So far, so good – right?

But it doesn’t take long before trouble breaks out when Ego and Humility start to have a very loud argument, and some of you may know that this is very distracting when you are trying to practice a little yoga. The argument goes something like this:

Ego: “We have been in down dog for ages! Has the instructor forgotten about us? This is killing my right wrist. I guess I haven’t fully recovered from that injury I had a few months ago. I don’t think I can stay in this pose any longer, but no one else is coming out of the pose and I don’t want to be different. I don’t want anyone to think that I can’t do it too. That would be embarrassing. Everyone will think there is something wrong with me, or that I’m not good enough to stay in the pose as long as they are. So I am just going to hang in there until……uh oh.”

Now all this time, soft-spoken Humility has been trying to get a word in, because Humility wanted to say:

“The instructor hasn’t said to come out of this pose, but my right wrist is really starting to hurt. I guess I haven’t fully recovered from the injury I had a few months ago. I wish I had mentioned this to the instructor before class, but I forgot. I’ll bet she could offer an alternate way of doing the pose. Meanwhile I don’t think I should stay in this pose any longer because that might cause injury to my wrist. I need to do what I think is best for me in this moment. I don’t know what others are doing, but I need to assume responsibility for my own practice and not worry about that.”